Mission Impossible: Filling A Bullet Train, Dumdum Or Otherwise

January 23, 1986|By Steve Weller, Columnist

THERE IS a plot afoot to build a bullet train in Florida. Call it a dumdum bullet.

We live in a state in which it takes four years to collect all the permits and variances needed to erect a Johnny-on-the-Spot and another six to fight off court suits filed by neighbors, environmentalists and competing portable potty purveyors. How many decades will pass before the ribbon is cut and the first bullet train pulls away from the station, 40 minutes behind schedule?

You and I will be dead, Maggie.

We live in a state in which nobody uses public transportation unless bound, gagged and dragged out of their cars, trucks and motor homes. How many people will spend 60 minutes getting to a station, 20 minutes waiting for luggage at the other end of the line, and another 60 minutes in traffic getting to the final destination just to take a 30-minute train ride that could be made by automobile in the same 170 minutes?

You and I will be exhumed and propped up in the club car, Maggie.

Admittedly, I am not a visionary. When it comes to such concepts as Star Wars and the Dolphins winning another Super Bowl in this century I am a flat Earth man. Never happen.

Theoretically, Miami, Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando and Daytona Beach will be linked by trains traveling up to 320 miles per hour. As one member of the Florida High Speed Rail Commission bubbled, with that kind of service ``Yeehaw Junction would be a perfect place to live`` if you worked in Miami.

Yeehaw must have changed since the last time I hitch-hiked through there 40 years ago. The general store had a nice selection of peanut butter crackers but the town`s other business, a buzzard taxidermist, was on the brink of Chapter 11.

Forget the odd little bedroom communities that would spring up among the scrub pines and palmettos if the dumdum becomes reality.

Imagine getting on the 7:35 every morning in Tampa, settling down to read your newspaper and, whoosh! The physics involved in getting up to speed, then slowing down for Lakeland would stick the paper right up your nose.

Even if a train could move that fast would you want to go 320 miles an hour on anything that could hit an orange tree?

No doubt the technology exists to make bullet train travel safe. On paper. But what happens when a stonehead in a pick-up truck tries to beat the gate at a crossing in Thonotosassa? Maybe there won`t be any crossings. Highway planners who will build 13 underpasses along an interstate for 30 panthers -- that`s one for every 2 Florida panthers on this earth -- would probably spring for a few hundred underpasses for people.

Okay. At more than 300 mph, what happens if an urchin places a penny on the thermal cushion or magnetic field or whatever it is that bullet trains travel on?

The most advanced technology has its limits. Airplanes can land in the dark on foggy nights at busy airports. They also can run into each other in big, empty skies in bright sunshine.

Bullet trains are popular in Japan and France because circumstances are different in those nations. In Japan, 6 million vehicles are immobolized in big city gridlock and the rest of that country`s cars are in the United States.

In France, where the breakfast of champions is a croissant and a snootful of table wine, very few travelers are in shape to drive.

The rail commission has warned local governments along the bullet corridor, which will follow the route of the Turnpike wherever possible, to get busy and draw up plans or be left out.

The deadline for preliminary paperwork is just months away. That will leave four years to, haw, trundle through the red tape and begin construction in 1990.

Between now and the target date, hundreds of planning meetings will be held to thrash out right-of-way arguments, environmental concerns and financial problems. Each session should be opened with a prayer and the playing of the Dragnet theme song.